every day, examine them with the
sobriety of practised eyes, to lay down altogether, modify in part, or
accept in whole, according as inductive experiment supports or destroys
conjecture.

Dr. Lloyd had been esteemed a learned naturalist long before he was
admitted to be a tolerable physician. Amidst the privations of his
youth he had contrived to form, and with each succeeding year he had
perseveringly increased, a zoological collection of creatures, not
alive, but, happily for the be holder, stuffed or embalmed. From what I
have said, it will be truly inferred that Dr. Lloyd's early career as
a physician had not been brilliant; but of late years he had gradually
rather aged than worked himself into that professional authority and
station which time confers on a thoroughly respectable man whom no one
is disposed to envy, and all are disposed to like.

Now in L---- there were two distinct social circles,--that of the
wealthy merchants and traders, and that of a few privileged families
inhabiting a part of the town aloof from the marts of commerce, and
called the Abbey Hill. These superb Areopagites exercised over the wives
and daughters of the inferior citizens to whom all of L----, except the
Abbey Hill, owed its prosperity, the same kind of mysterious influence
which the fine ladies of May Fair and Belgravia are reported to hold
over the female denizens of Bloomsbury and Marylebone.

Abbey Hill was not opulent; but it was powerful by a concentration
of its resources in all matters of patronage. Abbey Hill had its own
milliner and its own draper, its own confectioner, butcher, baker, and
tea-dealer; and the patronage of Abbey Hill was like the patronage
of royalty,--less lucrative in itself than as a solemn certificate of
general merit. The shops on which Abbey Hill conferred its custom
were certainly not the cheapest, possibly not the best; but they were
undeniably the most imposing. The proprietors were decorously pompous,
the shopmen superciliously polite. They could not be more so if they had
belonged to the State, and been paid by a public which they benefited
and despised. The ladies of Low Town (as the city subjacent to the Hill
had been styled from a date remote in the feudal ages) entered those
shops with a certain awe, and left them with a certain pride. There they
had learned what the Hill approved; there they had bought what the Hill
had purchased. It is much in this life to be quite sure that we are in